Pedestrians pass the Starbuck's on Nassau Street in Princeton; the recent consolidation of the borough and township will provide the locals a tax cut big enough to buy perhaps one venti a week.
(Jody Somers/For The Star-Ledger)

"Consolidation has been a really great thing, but we have been careful not to oversell it." - Princeton Mayor Liz Lempert

It’s not as though Jim Firestone doesn’t appreciate the property-tax cut he received as a result of the consolidation of the two Princetons. Heck, he’s saving enough money to go to the Starbucks around the corner once a week and buy a coffee. Not a venti perhaps, but a grande.

That’s about what Firestone will save on the property-tax bill on his small home not far from the Princeton University campus. When I visited him the other day, he said he doesn’t think that small savings was worth the loss of control the downtowners experienced last year when the borough merged with the township.

"Right now they want to see the town turned into a small city," Firestone said. "We like it the way it is."

Back when the borough had its own government, the residents could push back, said Firestone. But he said he fears the residents of what was formerly the township can’t relate to those living downtown.

"They’re not anywhere near the university," he said. "They think we have a personality disorder because we’re in the room with the elephant."

Firestone has other complaints about the merger as well. Take leaf and brush collection. The borough scheduled every two weeks, but some people in the former township want to cancel it and tell everyone to compost their brush, he said.

"In the township they can do that because they’ve got big yards," he said. "But you just walked through our composting area outside."

I did indeed. His entire yard is perhaps 6 feet by 30 feet. But the best argument came from Krystal Knapp. She’s a former Trenton Times reporter who now runs a news website called Planet Princeton. In a recent article, Knapp noted that the savings from the merger has been vastly exaggerated by the governor.

Gov. Chris Christie recently boasted that the merger permitted Princeton to cut spending by $3 million. In reality, $2.3 million of that $3 million represented services that were already shared by the borough and township before the merger, she said. The real savings was more like $700,000, she said. Mayor Liz Lempert agreed.

"It was unfortunate he used that figure," Lempert said of Christie. "Consolidation has been a really great thing, but we have been careful not to oversell it."

The mayor said she expects to see more savings from streamlining in the future. Those savings will be welcome. But they’re unlikely to amount to major tax cuts for a simple reason: Each of the prior Princetons was already larger than the optimal size.

That’s the conclusion of Ray Caprio and Marc Pfeiffer of the Bloustein Local Government Research Center at Rutgers, who are working on a study of municipal consolidation in New Jersey. They’ve found that the most efficient municipalities are between 6,201 and 8,200 in population. Both Princetons were already bigger than that, so no great gains should be expected from the merger, they said when I called them.

"To be out there saying consolidation is the solution to the property-tax problem is setting people up for something that can’t work," said Caprio.

Governor Christie at an event promoting restoring the 2 percent cap on public-employee labor settlements; that would help keep property taxes down but municipal consolidation offers little prospect of success.Ed Murray/The Star-Ledger

There are some small savings that could result from more sharing of services, he said. But municipal tax is typically about a quarter of the total property-tax bill. The 1.6 percent cut in the Princeton tax rate, for example, amounted to only about 0.4 percent on the tax bill of a guy like Firestone.

So why do the Trenton pols keep pushing municipal consolidation? Simple. It permits them to dodge the blame for a situation they created.

Back in 1976, the Trenton crowd promised us that the addition of an income tax would provide enough revenue to cure the property-tax problem. But like most suburbs, Princeton gets shortchanged. Its residents pay about $119 million in income taxes per year. They get back a mere $3,361,000 in school aid, which is the primary form of property-tax relief.

Neither party has a plan to change that system. So instead of helping the small towns, they want to get rid of them.

That may sound nutty in a place like Princeton. But it makes perfect sense in Trenton.